he joins me now from washington. also with us in washington ray takeyh, he is a senior fellow for middle eastern studies at the council on foreign relation. i welcome him back as well. so tell me, jay, about this. what is it that they have that may be a faster path to a nuclear capacity? >> they're constructing a heavy water reactor in the northwest in a town called iraq, arak. and in some ways it's not new. i think in 2004 they started construction and as far back as 2006 the u.n. security council passed a resolution telling the iranians they had to stop. what's alarmed. aiea, u.s. and europeans in recent, kind of last three or four months is that iranians have been saying we're going start testing this facility by the end of the year this year. and we're going to start introducing nuclear materials into it by next summer. so conceivably i don't think they could actually start extracting plutonium immediately. but once you start firing up that reactor, you are producing weapons-grade plutonium. and you know everyone